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Read on for the rest of the shortlisted entries...

WISE@SS 2.0Mike Barretta

"Mrs Ramirez, I am Special Tech Detective Slonski." He pushed past into her home. "We have a warrant." Three uniformed tech cops followed and fanned out into adjoining rooms. "Are you in custody of a Nokia G-plex Sidemind?"

"Yes, I dropped it yesterday and it broke," said Mrs Ramirez.

"We know. Net watch reported the incident," said Detective Slonski.

"It's in the kitchen junk drawer," said Mrs Ramirez. "And what incident? It's just a phone."

He emptied her kitchen drawers on the countertop. "No, it's a Nokia G-plex and it falls under the endangered sentients act." He cradled the phone with both hands. A technician took it away.

"Detective Slonski, I have something to show you," said a voice.

Slonski disappeared for a moment then came back. "How long have you had that refrigerator in the pantry?"

"You can't keep LG's alone. My God woman, if they don't learn to talk by two it's too late. Who knows what that fridge could have been?"

"You need to see this, sir," said a voice from upstairs.

"Bring her," said Slonski to a female tech cop.

They climbed the stairs and stood just inside her son's bedroom. His desk was a jumble of pried-open cellphones, disassembled tablets, and smart toys in various states of disrepair.

"Do you belong to some sort of cult?" asked Slonski. "It's like a satanic altar."

"My son likes to make things and do experiments."

"You mean commit atrocities," said Detective Slonski.

"I found an iPhone," said a tech cop. He held up the ancient tech like a prize.

"Turn it on and check the apps," said Detective Slonski.

"Bingo! Wise@ss 2.0, the progenitor of all AI," said the tech cop.

"That stupid app? It eavesdrops on conversations and blurts out sarcasm at inappropriate times," said Mrs Ramirez.

Powell Corporation Wetware is a global leader in speculative theory processing and research. As such, we believe in employing only the best minds in the world.

It has recently come to our attention that your brain is mapped at an E4 level (highly creative), which would make you an asset to any research team. We, therefore, are pleased to extend an offer of employment to you, assuming a successful interview and EEG brain scan.

Anticipating that this is not the only proposal you will receive, we are prepared to offer you our E5-level pay grade with the possibility of advancement.

We also extend similar terms for a cohabiting spouse or partner, who would also be offered employment regardless of brain mapping scale (bonuses apply for spouses above D7 ratings), and up to two children below the age of 35.

The position we are looking for you to fill is that of a standard Think-Out-Of-Box Creative Adjunct for one of our state-of-the-art Research Computers. As you probably know (probability 98.3274%) from your current job at Indigitech Logistic Support Services, you will not be required to be conscious for any of the 44 hours a week that you would be plugged into the research cloud.

We sincerely hope that you will consider our generous offer. To schedule your interview and EEG, please reply to this email or contact the company AI.

Thank you for your consideration,

Powell Corporation Wetware, Human Resources and Development

UNTITLEDDan Argent

My full name is Marlowe-8210-K, but everyone calls me Karl. I live in an apartment with my brother Jay in one of the shabbier parts of the city. Our apartment is pretty small, just the two rooms and a shower cubby, but that's all we can afford these days. Our societal utility score is low, almost zero, and if things don't take a turn for the better soon, I'll be the last of our clone line born into this world. Sure, the Machines designed our genotype to produce a long line of great artists, but after eleven generations all that the Marlowe-8210 line had to show for itself was a mildly fashionable decade back around brother Frank's day. It's almost funny sometimes - the Machines can calculate the folding of a protein to the nth degree of accuracy, but human biology is still stubbornly imperfect and messy. Most of the time they get what they want, but some clone-lines just don't live up to expectations.

I can hear Jay cursing in the next room. He's a lot older than me, at least three decades, and I think it depresses him living with a younger copy. Right now he's working on something, some kind of mood sculpture, but he finds it hard to concentrate. I suppose he feels responsible for it all, being the older sibling. I tell him not to worry, that when I've finished school I'll create something stupendous, some work of art that will go down in history. Most of the time that cheers him up, but sometimes he gets angry and can't bear to be around me. I don't dare tell him that according to my teacher I'm even worse an artist than he is. Anyway, I'm hiding this recording under the apartment floor with a photo of me and Jay plus a few micro-lithographs that we made together. I know it's stupid, but I just want to leave something, some small indication that once our family existed. Things don't seem so bad when I think that perhaps someday someone will view this.

Remember us,
Karl

BALANCING ACTEddy Richards

Stern squinted at the low energy screen.

"Hmmm", he murmured, "An egg, yes, on toast... I can Balance that with some emails supporting animal rights and sponsoring a new tree in Norfolk." A few presses and that was breakfast dealt with.

Noticing that his batt-charge had entered the green zone he smiled wryly in memory of the chants he'd learned at school:

"Green is Good; Green for Go; Balance your actions in a row."

It hadn't quite worked out like that though. Still, enough juice to let him hear the news.

" ...and in a text release, the Campaign for Responsible Living warned that the latest patch to Ethobalance 9.2 was still inadequate to reflect the true social costs of having children, even with better factoring of environmental impacts. A spokesperson for BalSoft refuted the allegations, saying that the CRL should live in the real world.

"On a related note, the terrorist splinter group Sons of Gaia threatened to take action against those they described as 'living room ethicists' who played the system without genuinely trying to live by Balance principles. The police warned..."

Stern growled and switched the broadcast off, muttering that it was a waste even of free energy to listen to anything about those nutters.

"Now I really should concentrate on today's Balance," he said to himself, tapping the screen furiously. He juggled his social, environmental and economic pluses and minuses from his activities until they generated a straight line - straight enough anyway, he decided, priding himself on spotting things involving little effort but which the programme gave weight to.

He pushed himself up from the compstation and reached for his coat, wondering vaguely why the comp was still active. He failed to hear the quiet hiss of gas through the ventilation shaft until it was too late. As he collapsed he glimpsed his screen proclaiming "You have been Balanced by the Sons of Gaia". His last thoughts were how unfair this was, he'd always been straight.

As his eyes dimmed and closed, so did the screen, automatically moving to energy-saving mode.

UNTITLEDMaggie Bandur

Winter had to admit it: he was in love with the garbage miner. He hadn't even looked directly at a mortal in ages; it was just too sad. But somehow, he had seen her, and instead of inspecting the mining operation once a year - all a soft-hearted man could stand - he came up with excuses that kept taking him beyond the high city walls.

The method was simple: strip mine the detritus of past centuries, separate the glass, metal and plastic --the two former to be melted down, the latter to be regurgitated by bacteria as petrol ? and avoid the bursts of methane that rose blue like supernatural lights in old ghost stories. Thank goodness past generations had left behind so much. Resources had been devoured fast enough before people lived forever.

Of course, it wasn't all people. The process was expensive and real estate limited. And it wasn't really forever. No one was sure how long human life could be extended, although no limit had been reached. He'd been among the last accepted to the program: the never-ending treatments and rewirings and transplants. His mother raised the money by sacrificing herself in those barbaric days when organs came from donors. He felt guilty, but he liked continuing to be.

The girl was young and perfect, but it was a round, soft perfection. She had not been tweaked or restructured. She swayed with the wind and turned her face to feel the sun. She experienced things for the first time - or even the first hundred. No one he knew lived moments any more. They filled time. With drugs or intrigues or worship. God had been resurrected to explain why they deserved to live forever and those outside did not. It seemed religion existed not to explain death, but anything terribly unfair.

She shone gold, as she watched the sunset from a trash heap. She recognized him and waved. He waved back, but the chill at the nape of his neck told him he could not return. When she smiled, lines had crinkled around her eyes.

CHAIN OF BEINGMatt Wingett

This is why I love you. Because you held me in your arms when I was young, and you smiled at me when we walked on the beach at the edge of the Quantocks. I love you because you told me of the cities below the sea, of managed retreat, and of love. You told me of love when we walked on the beach, and I knew then that the bond between a father and his daughter was unbreakable.

I loved you when you grew older, and saw your sadness at my love-life. They were good boys, those boys - but things never worked out. One time, sailing back from London to Oxford I trailed my hand lazily in the Midland Lake. We weren't meant to take off our UV screens, but we did. I remember the reflection on your face. The sparkle in your eyes. The crease above your nose deepened. But it had always been present - even in the holograms of the younger you. There was something in me, you said, deeper than you understood.

When I realised that the regrown tissue a man of your wealth could buy would no longer hold your old body together, I struck up a friendship with the Co-ordinator at the Organ Replacement Centre. It became more than a friendship, and I saw in your dying eyes that long-present cloud lifted. How beautiful it all was. The man responsible for prolonging your life was now in charge of your daughter. Those were your words: "In charge."

Before you died, I spoke with him. I wheedled. I begged. "There's little a man can do in the face of love," - you said that yourself. It was true: a gamete, a stem cell; a little modification is a very little thing indeed.

I did not weep at your funeral. It was a temporary goodbye. I was carrying you even then. And when I gave birth to you, and saw that little crease in your brow, your eyes as unclouded as the last time we spoke, I knew our love was a chain.

Unbreakable.

THE SUN AND LITTLE MOONKirsty Semple

The sun would be gone soon. Every evening of her eight and a half years Little Moon had watched the pulsating light of the dying sun as is buried itself beneath the horizon. In the desert all around her shadows throbbed, tormented.

Her mother used to tell her about the sun. The science men had sent a probe and crashed it. Now the sun flickered. Her mother told her that they had to live here, that all the men were fighting each other now the sun was broken.

Little Moon frowned at something alien in the twilit sky. Then she froze in fear. A saucer-shaped aircraft shot towards her, its chrome metal body spewing fire and smoke. She saw UFOs everyday taking men to important places, but none that were like fire-breathing dragons.

A silver coloured dragon scale fell from the base of the aircraft. Then Little Moon watched as a man half fell, half jumped from the UFO, hitting the ground in front of her with a puff of sand. Some way behind her the aircraft also found the ground and exploded, consuming itself in its own fire.

When she kicked him he grunted. She decided this was good. So she tore up her spare dress and clumsily bandaged his wounds. Then she waited.

When he woke he looked first at her and then the bloody rags.

"I nursed my mother's wounds," she explained.

"She went to the city on the day of the mushroom cloud and when she came back all her insides came out."

The fallen man pressed his eyes with his fingers. "What is your name?"

"Little moon," he said. "Did you know that it is one hundred years since man discovered water on the moon?"

Delicately, he got to his feet and, once he found his balance, he walked away in the direction the aircraft had been flying; going to his important place. Little Moon watched, hushed and alone again.

And the sun went out.

UNTITLEDRebecca May

Savage orange washes the sea as lightning forks down onto the rig, illuminating the churning cyanobacteria in sick neon. The air conditioning whines painfully and sparks rain down from the iron conductors, forcing me back into the office.

"It's rough out again," says Adam, chewing absently and without much enjoyment on his phytoplankton bar.

The power glitches out for a second; my processor reboots from autosave.

"With all this weather, you'd think we'd have enough power from the turbines," I grumble.
But I know our batteries are old, along with much of our equipment, and nobody here knows how to replace them; we're too specialised. We have to trade with the Chinese corporations, and we're waiting for the FTSE to swing a bit in our favour, because McDollars aren't worth what they were. Although according to our corporate broadcast, the work we're doing here will change all that.

I take the hint and shut up: with unemployment at 74% and rising, we're lucky to be living on this floating island. Only yesterday we watched fifteen of our low producing erstwhile colleagues leaving for the motherland on a dirty tug boat, to grub in the ever diminishing acres of dirt for what they can find along with the millions of others not lucky enough to find company sponsorship. With the sea levels and the population rising year on year, dry land isn't a nice place to be right now.

Jenkins got all maudlin and started quoting from Revelations again and we had to shut him up before the voice recognition software declared him insane. His PhD only buys him so much protection.

I log back in and read over the synthetic brain results with tired eyes. The umami is slightly up, but the cingulate gyrus isn't responding as hoped. If we don't improve our palatability and addictivity we'll lose market share, and that could be lethal. Everyone on this floating island depends on Adam, Jenkins and I creating a formula for the perfect algae burger.

UNTITLEDBruce Alcorn

Henk had watched the horse climb the winding road towards him for most of the morning. It was a superb clear Autumn day, and the distant solitary wind turbine was still. Occasionally, Henk reached beneath his deteriorating Kevlar to scratch at prickling sweat.

A grey horse with a single rider, pulling a small covered cart. Binoculars and the last surviving perimeter camera had revealed no obvious weapons.

The rider eventually halted near the almost illegible "KEEP DRIVING" sign, and eyed Henk's rifle.

"Inspection?"

Henk nodded. The other dismounted, and stood with arms outstretched. His horse gave the dry ground a cursory sniff, sighed deeply and waited with practised resignation.

"You know, most towns don't bother with this anymore," the young man mumbled around the thermometer as Henk was checking his glands.

"We got taught to be cautious. Hard. What's in the cart?"

A delighted smile lit the narrow face, revising Henk's age estimate further downwards.

"Let me show you."

He lifted one side of the drab tarpaulin, and was greeted with a clamour of indignant coos and trills.

Wire fronted wooden boxes, meticulously stacked, held dozens of grey and brown birds in small compartments.

"Pigeons!"

"Homing pigeons. Carrier pigeons." He extended a finger through the wire, gently stroked a round head.

"I have eggs, too. Your town can breed them, send them like this to other towns. It will take time, but we'll eventually be able to communicate in days, hours. A network. Slow and inefficient, but a start."

The billiard table of the brain is multi-dimensional, and what caroms off sleeptime’s fabrications to become this morning’s memories is no more than imagination drunk on the remains of experience, fermented like dark porter in the cauldron of night’s mysteries to shine like constellations across the firmament of the mind’s deep sky.

Their fire in your mitochondrial machine energizes each fantasy of what your life could and can become… _ EndFragment ...

Johan Pauwels
on December 17, 2009 8:18 PM

Great stuff, but aren't all of these writers pros?

Duckypoos
on December 18, 2009 2:17 PM

Is that true, Sumit Paul-Choudhury? Are they all pros? It'd be nice to know. It's much more impressive if they're unpublished NS readers.
Either way, I particularly like the last one , the aspirational geek does it for me.

We didn't ask for any biographical details, so I can't answer that question. A quick search shows that some of our shortlisted authors have previous publication credits - as you might expect - while others don't seem to.

In any case, the judges weren't aware of the authors' identities, so these stories were selected purely on the basis of merit.

Mike Barretta
on December 24, 2009 8:46 PM

If by pro you mean: able to support myself by writing then the answer is no. If you mean: someone who has sold a story before then: yes. I personally consider myself a middling to advanced amatuer. Happy for the confusion though!

Kirsty Semple
on December 26, 2009 5:59 PM

I'm also happy for the confusion. I have never sold a story or had one published so I'm nowhere near a pro. I'm just a humble sci-fi fan and amateur writer.

I really enjoyed this competition, thanks everyone!

Christopher Hanula
on December 29, 2009 4:52 AM

This is the first thing I have ever had published.

Eddy Richards
on January 8, 2010 3:01 PM

I'm definitely not a pro either (I wish I were!) - and am very pleased to have been shortlisted

Bruce Alcorn
on January 13, 2010 10:51 AM

I've just found this, after returning from holidays. First, I'll add my name to the list of "definitely not pros" and "extremely pleased to be picked".

Second, and unfortunately a bit late, I feel I should point out that my story is missing a few lines of dialogue. For the most part, this doesn't hurt it, but without the original third to last line, the end is a little nonsensical.
(NS web team, if it helps, all of the missing lines were in quotes - apparently there's a webform gremlin with a taste for single line spoken dialogue.)

The final few lines were submitted as follows:

Henk was staring at the boy with new respect, and a little awe.

"Are you... a Geek?"

There was wistfulness in the young eyes, determination in the mouth.

"Not yet. But I will be."

Kat Austen - Letters and Community editor
on January 15, 2010 3:38 PM

Dear Bruce,
Thanks for flagging that up. I spoke to the guys involved here and they were sure that the text went online complete and we think you're right that there was some webform gremlin that caused the problem. We've changed it as you specified, and we're sorry that the lines were missing.
All the best, Kat

Matthew Wingett
on March 6, 2010 8:43 AM

Hi, yes, I'm a professional writer, although I currently do advertising copy, not fiction. I didn't realise that this wasn't open to all - I just thought you had to enjoy reading the New Scientist - which I do!

To be honest with you, this has come as a really big boost to me. I really want to break into the fiction arena, but all too often I seem to get distracted doing advertising copy and newsletters. So being recognised by a big publication means a lot to me. Thank you.

By the way, I don't know why mine is untitled. I thought I'd called it "Chain of Being". Is it too late to add a title?

Thanks once again. You've renewed my faith in my ability to create a mood and tell a story. Even a very small one.

Get a very long extension cord. Kidding, are these gas or electric appliances? Most gas wh's don't require electricity. Obviously the dryer does and the stove may or not depending on if it is electric ignition or not.

There are a couple ways one can discover if you suffer from TMJ, first is after your partner whines about the constant grinding and other way is you notice that following a night’s rest you get up with a terrible ache in the jaws and a dull, constant headache. If this is you, a checkup by the dentist.